Super-Secure Quantum Cable Hiding in the Holland Tunnel - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloombergquint.com/businessweek/the-super-secure-quantum-cable-hiding-in-the-holland-tunnel#gs.joYx7bDV <comment><USER2> "Each key is usually extra-encrypted, but documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in 2013 showed that the U.S. government, which hoovers up most of the world's internet traffic, can also break those tougher codes. Exactly how the NSA accomplishes this isn't widely known. (One suspicion is that while keys are supposed to be based on multiplying two random large prime numbers together, many systems use a relatively small subset of primes, making it much easier for a computer to guess the key.)"

Sorry, what a load of bullshit...

<comment><USER3> This sounds like sort of reasonably OK layman's explanation of Weak DH [https://weakdh.org/](https://weakdh.org/)

<comment><USER4> Except that Weak DH only needs one prime - not two. It sounds like the author conflated RSA with DH somehow. It's _very_ rare for real in-the-wild RSA keys to share factors (barring stupid errors like Debian's randomization fail).

<comment><USER5> Not as rare as it should be (see [https://cryptosense.com/blog/more-weak-rsa- keys-in-network-d...](https://cryptosense.com/blog/more-weak-rsa-keys-in- network-devices/)) -- but there are much easier fixes than QKD.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted and they don't arrive at the > endpoint at the expected nanosecond, the sender and receiver know their > communication has been compromised.

This isn't how QKD works - it isn't based on timing or delays. The common BB84 protocol (and the decoy-state modification) are based on the fact that measuring a photon necessarily changes it. Essentially, it is easy to distinguish a photon that's been measured twice from a photon that's been measured once (statistically speaking). Because an eavesdropper would _necessarily_ have to measure photons in order to extract any useful information about the communication, their presence can be easily detected.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Yet for high-speed transmissions under real-world conditions, the record is just 60 miles. Farther transmissions require a series of "trusted nodes," relays that are themselves vulnerable to hackers or physical tapping. China uses armed guards to secure the nodes in its 1,240-mile QKD network"

Armed guards at the relays.. I wonder what they are transmitting on that cable. In any case it seems they take the thread of fiber tapping very seriously. I bet the US government have similar experiments only they don't talk about it.

</comment><comment><USER7> I still don't understand the point of quantum key distribution. It protects against passive snooping but not against an active man-in-the-middle attack: thus it gives you no more protection than, say, the Diffie-Hellman exchange performed at the start of every TLS connection. The main counterargument is that quantum computers can break Diffie-Hellman, and can do so retroactively if someone is tapping your communications today and saving them for the future. But post-quantum public key cryptography exists; admittedly it's not as vetted yet as the traditional kind. but it will be soon enough, so even if there's some rationale for using QKD today, it's not the "future-looking" technology it's sold as.

And in the meantime, if you really want to guarantee the confidentiality of your shared secret that badly, you can just physically drive over to the other organization carrying a copy of it. Inconvenient, but surely less so than running long fiber-optic cables through tunnels solely for that purpose.

<comment><USER8> QKD does defend against active man-in-the-middle. Working from the premise that qubits in general cannot be cloned (the no-cloning theorem), a protocol can be devised that can detect tempering by an adversary with unlimited computational power and technological abilities. BB84[1] is such a protocol, which is also used in commercial QKD products.

Of course it doesn't defend against attacks on the devices, buildings or people; these are likely higher ranked risks than crypto attacks for many organisations.

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB84](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB84)

<comment><USER4> I think OP's point is that no key establishment protocol - quantum or otherwise - protects against a true "man-in-the-middle" who can simply negotiate different keys with both parties and transparently decrypt-encrypt in the middle.

Of course, this isn't what QKD is supposed to solve, anyway. QKD does not address authentication, only key distribution.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >showed that the U.S. government, which hoovers up most of the world's internet traffic, can also break those tougher codes

There's a lot the NSA hasn't broken. Why not just use higher block sizes like RSA-2048 or large DHE parameters instead of a quantum network?

<comment><USER10> How do you know what the NSA has broken?

<comment><USER11> We don't. In cryptography we generally trade off information theoretic security for computational security. This means that (more broadly speaking) we don't usually _know_ what _anyone_ has broken if there's no public proof.

But that also means that, as a research community, we've mostly accepted that that's okay. Likewise as a heuristic we can generally say the same thing about any cryptographic algorithm that hasn't been publicly broken. And that means that evaluating the security of publicly unbroken cryptography by postulating the hypothetical strength of the NSA isn't very useful.

We know the following based on an examination of history:

1) Most vulnerabilities which compromise confidentiality or authenticity actually happen in cryptographic _implementations_ or infrastructure code, not algorithm design;

2) RSA has not been publicly broken. Moreover, we have no research providing a way to break RSA given current technology (nor even a path forward);

3) Quantum key distribution is extremely immature technology, which trades off decades of well-studied literature about computational security to pursue information theoretic assurances.

Quantum key distribution is an extremely overengineered and brittle solution. That's not to say it isn't technically _cool_...but it's difficult to reconcile with everything we know about modern cryptography.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > ...fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a > single photon. If any of the pulses' paths are interrupted...

We are living in the future already.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. Here in The Netherlands there will be a quantum network connecting Delft, The Hague, Leiden and Amsterdam, but that's largely still a research project and it won't be up and running before 2020. If QuantumXC has commercially available tech then they seem to be ahead by a couple of years.

<comment><USER8> That research quantum network has a different purpose. Quantum key distribution (QKD) as mentioned in the article has been commercially available for a number of years now (for example by ID Quantique [1]). These products rely on having a direct connection, i.e. a single fibre line without repeaters or other 'interruptions'. This limits their range to about 100km (20dB attenuation).

The research network in The Netherlands is more ambitious than that. The researchers' goal is to build a true quantum internet, with 'quantum repeaters' that allow connections over longer distances [2]. These quantum repeaters work on the principe of quantum entanglement generation and purification to achieve quantum teleportation of qubits to allow end to end communication [3].

If you're interested in learning more about this, I can highly recommend the free edX course by TU Delft and Caltech on quantum cryptography [4].

[1]: [https://www.idquantique.com/quantum-safe- security/overview/q...](https://www.idquantique.com/quantum-safe- security/overview/qkd-technology/) [2]: [https://qutech.nl/roadmap/quantum- internet/](https://qutech.nl/roadmap/quantum-internet/) [3]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_network#Quantum_repe...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_network#Quantum_repeaters) [4]: [https://www.edx.org/course/quantum- cryptography-0](https://www.edx.org/course/quantum-cryptography-0)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What I see when I tap the link on mobile:

1\. Huge ad at the top.

2\. Large persistent bar under that telling me I'm on Bloomburg's Site.

3\. Headline in large bold font.

4\. Author and dateline

5\. Huge blue (sharing?) icon with white dots

6\. Huge persistent bar begging me to log in or subscribe.

7\. Large persistent ad at the bottom.

After much scrolling you can get to the article. The state of mobile web journalism I guess.

<comment><USER9> Is there an extension that converts news articles to basic HTML and then allows custom CSS to be applied to it?

<comment><USER15> Firefox has reader mode which is fairly configurable and does a good job.

Firefox for Android has it as well, combined with ublock origin it makes reading long form on a phone pleasant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > fire data in weak pulses of light, each just a little bigger than a single > photon.

so the stream can't be split because the bits are so small?

<comment><USER4> Technically speaking when you turn a laser's power down far enough, you start adjusting the _probability_ that the laser will emit a photon. Many pulses will generate zero photons, some will generate one, and a few might generate two or more. The two or more case is the scary one where an attacker could siphon off a photon to measure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Why not just encrypt all traffic e2e?</comment>


Ask HN: New job, having some anxiety, am I in over my head? - <AUTHOR> I just started a new job as a fullstack .net developer last week, I have about 2.5 years of experience. Most of the stuff I've worked on has been .net core APIs, occasional front-end and manual sql queries. When I interviewed, I was told that they have an angular/.net core app. But few days after I started there, I found that there's another old MVC app that's been de-prioritized, and they want my help to deciding if it could be updated or completely redone.
Our team is small, just 1 principal engineer, 1 senior, and 2 devs, and me. They are all working on the main app, and I've been tasked to look at the old app and tell them whether it should be updated or remake from scratch. It's making me a little anxious because I don't have any experience in designing app this complex, and I feel like they are expecting a lot from me even though I only 2.5 years of experience. I asked to have permission to see the code base, but they only gave me access to the old app, and finally gave me the access to see the frontend code of the main app. Every standup I feel left out because they're all working on the main app, and I just say I'm poking around the code of the old app and trying to familiarize myself with it.
I've emphasized that my strength is in working with .net core APIs but they haven't give me access to the repo. I feel like they just really want me to work on the old app. If that's the case, I feel like it's a great opportunity for me to take charge of this, but also a lot of responsibility. I'm not sure where to start, they say the product manager is designing a new flow for the app, and I feel like I can't really make any meaningful decision before knowing what the new flow is. If the new flow has complicated UI, then the app should be remake to something like angular/.net core. What are some things I can prepare myself with? Start drawing database table relationship diagrams to get a better understanding what entities I'll need in the future? <comment><USER2> Stop worrying about it. Continue to poke at the old code and learn how it works. Do what you can do and be honest about what you can't do. If things aren't looking better in a couple of months, then you might start looking for another job, but give this one a fair shot first.</comment>


Why Google Wave needs a major overhaul - <AUTHOR> http://db.tidbits.com/article/11074

<comment><USER2> I find that about 1/2 of the objections in this post have todo with cultural, not technical issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems to me that wave needs an overhaul at the product level. If I can't quickly discover compelling uses of the product then I think the product is flawed. It feels a lot like wave was developed in a vacuum compared to Google's other products. For instance, I don't think many people inside Google use wave, which is the complete opposite of gmail, gchat/gtalk, calendar and docs. That should be a significant signal right there.

</comment><comment><USER4> I wish Google had used the time and effort they put into Wave instead to beef up Google Docs. To me Google Docs itself could be a great collaborative tool if the applications weren't so crippled and basic. Integrate it with G-Chat, add a OneNote style information management tool and make Docs/Spreadsheets at least as functional as an early 90's Windows 3.x Office suite. I'm really baffled at the lack of attention Google Docs is getting while all these new Google services spring up. Someone (probably Microsoft) is going to eat their lunch. I admire that Google is trying to push forward with a new way of doing things via Wave but ignoring what users actually want today, a good collaborative office package, and conceding the market to someone else is just a dumb move for an advertising company to make. You gotta give the people what they want.

<comment><USER5> I think though in this case, what people say they want isn't what they really need.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Seriously, this article ignores the important aspect of Wave, something that it doesn't ignore for something like Email. Email is useless without other people using Email. So is a chat program. Wave is useless without other people as well. This is why Wave isn't based around Google, but rather, a protocol that anyone can use.

Consider that email was first 'invented' in the early 70's, and SMTP in the early 80's, emails adoption speed was comparable to that of a glacier in terms of todays adoption speeds.

Wave is such a big undertaking that even Google will have to work hard to move it forward. But consider for a moment how much work is involved with email, and yet, today, how easy it is to integrate with your average website. Indeed, we don't think about how much is built on email. It's wide spread use lets us forget that it would be useless if no one else used it.

So yes, while the Google Wave client is still in its infancy, and Wave itself is still an early idea, the idea and what it represents is major. Email, IM, Social Networking, etc, won't be replaced by Wave, much like none of these replaced Email as a means to communicate. Rather, Wave will become apart of these means of communication. Wave is the protocol that allows for this communication.

Something as simple as Hacker News comments could easily be a wave, and it wouldn't require us, the users to do anything, yet we could benefit greatly from Wave being apart of the system.

So every time I see someone complain about Wave, I can't help but think that they would have said the same thing about email when it first appeared.

<comment><USER6> I feel like Wave is not really something for the masses, at least not right now - I never feel the compulsion to use Wave at home, but I _definitely_ feel it at work, where there are gigantic, meandering email threads that defy my ability to track the different tangents that sprout.

My hunch is that Wave was born internally to address that specific problem - corporate email and its requisite long discussions with way too many people. Part of its struggle is to prove its usefulness and relevance to people who _don't_ deal with this type of communication.

<comment><USER5> The thing is, it works the same way email does, but it also has additional capabilities as well. The problem is, email is widely supported, wave isn't. Imagine every instance where email is used and you can replace it with Wave. The benefits to Wave might not be immediately and as widely as useful in every situation to everyone person, but that's more a matter of it not being used in a wide spread way.

Imagine Amazon using Wave instead of Email, along with it's customers using Wave instead of Email. Amazon could use Wave to automatically update the Wave of a person's order with the latest shipping information. This shipping information can be bulled in from Canada Post (or wherever) and automatically update. Rather then sending out a full email every time something changes, they could simply send along an update that updates the original Wave.

Nothing is lost, due to the nature of Wave, but it suddenly becomes much easier to find the information I want.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> We've been using Wave a bit at work.

It's nice that a ping (IM) can turn into a threaded chat can turn into a document. Editing, with change bars, is great.

It's also great that you can add someone to a wave "late" and they get to see the current state of the wave -- and the history if they care. Much better than forwarding someone an email that has done the rounds.

I agree with the person that suggested it is more useful "for work". Think of it more as "Lotus Notes"-lite than email.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've been involved in a couple of "please participate in some interactive feedback on my app" wave discussions with some friends.

People had to email me to make me aware of the waves. I'm not normally signed in to google. So there's a participation/discovery speed bump for people like me.

However, there was no speed bump in getting that initial message to me via email.

Removing that hard to see speed bump, and other things like it, might benefit wave more than feature fixing.

</comment><comment><USER9> Everyone got really excited during the demo at Google I/O, but the second I used it my reaction was "what do I do with this?". Email, IM and Twitter. That's all I need.

<comment><USER10> Wave is great for organizing trips (or at least in concept it should be, unfortunately it still needs a lot of work). That's pretty much the only thing i use it for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like Buzz should have been based on Wave

</comment><comment><USER12> Not a great long article like this but I put my thoughts about Buzz together on my blog and I think HNers might like to see it. <http://chanux.wordpress.com/2010/02/14/my-buzz-rant>

</comment><comment><USER13> Wave is and always will be a research project. It was only launched because Google doesn't believe in pure research projects, and mistakenly classified it as a "product."

</comment><comment><USER14> The original intention for Wave was as a protocol. The Wave client we all use at wave.google.com is just a reference client. Anybody know of other clients that do better?

<comment><USER15> Etherpad?

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly better for some uses. I think a key point is that there's no reason why Etherpad couldn't (or shouldn't) be built on top of Wave.

<comment><USER16> Well the Etherpad guys are working at Google on the Wave team now so you never know

<comment><AUTHOR> My point was more that some other thing like Etherpad, in the future, will be built directly on Wave instead of having to build AppJet first to be able to build a text editor on top.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> FUD; a wave-to-email gateway is solved by design.</comment>


Travels From The Monk That Lives in My Phone - <AUTHOR> http://boboandchichi.com/2015/08/travels-from-the-monk-that-lives-in-my-phone/?repost=1 <comment><USER2> There was a slightly surreal version of a similar story published to BuzzFeed some time ago [http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/i-followed-my-stolen- iphone-a...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/i-followed-my-stolen-iphone- across-the-world-became-a-celebr)

</comment><comment><USER3> So when they sync with iCloud wouldn't the monk get their photos?

</comment><comment><USER4> A similar thing happened to me when I lost a phone in Vietnam. I ended up having to remotely nuke the phone in order to stop the photos when a few images came through of a family visiting a grave. Too creepy.

<comment><USER5> I wonder how common/repeatable this is, and what the minimum requirements are for a device to get picked up and used this way. It might be an interesting art project for someone to plant a few tens of cheap smartphones around, assuming we could reasonably expect at least several of them to broadcast interesting slices of people's lives.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking the exact same thing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The lack of any apparent attempt at reconfiguring/personalising a device you find and don't intend to return, but instead what seems to be just regular use, must be due to a very different attitude/knowledge about computers in general. It's a very interesting story though.

<comment><USER8> This idea of returning things you found does not exist everywhere. I know places where if you found something you would look up and thank the heavens for looking out for you today. You would not think that someone lost something, but rather that someone upstairs brought you a gift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting in a voyeuristic way. Wouldn't it be cool to be able to "tap in" to someone else's photos across the world, in exchange for making your own photos available for one and only one _other_ person to tap into? Like a one- way chatroulette for photos.

<comment><USER10> This exists, it's called Rando.

EDIT: was, apparently it was killed after some guy wrote a script to spam the same image.

<comment><USER11> Was it by any chance a certain _ahem_ iconic piece of artwork from 4chan?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This guy is posting someone else's private photos on the internet, without the person's knowledge or consent. That's not cool.

<comment><USER13> Someone else's private photos. Taken on a stolen iPod. Using stolen credentials.

I fail to see how these photos are private.

<comment><USER14> I aggre, the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer.

The monk has a number of options:

1\. Reset the iPod(which he cant do cause it requires an appleId password),

2\. Dont take pictures with the Ipod.

3\. Disable icloud sync.(i think one can do that with out authentication)

4\. Dont use the Ipod.

5\. Use it and share the pictures.

He has clearly "chosen" nr 5.

I know this is controversial but in my mind if you fuck up it is up to you to "fix" it. It's capitalism.

<comment><USER12> "the monk has clearly "chosen" to share them to the writer"

Even if you accept that, it doesn't mean it's not a dick move to share the photos on the internet.

Think about the photos you've shared with friends. Would you be happy if all of them were made available to everyone in the world?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I feel we should be more productive and focus on finding a way for the owner to get a message to the monk instead of debating copyright...

<comment><USER10> You can use iCloud to send messages to your devices, it should be easy enough: [http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/18/send-a-message-to-an- iphone-i...](http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/18/send-a-message-to-an-iphone-ipad- or-mac-from-icloud/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice attitude (and gift of pictures ) on loosing your ipod !

</comment><comment><USER17> Interesting situation. I really hate this kind of writing though because I wish it would just start with "I lost my ipod touch and now some guy is using it to post pictures on my timeline" instead of being mysterious and trying to build suspense.

Maybe I'm too impatient.</comment>


Startl: Startup Implementation Language - <AUTHOR> http://assembly.com/startl

<comment><AUTHOR> It will be a domain specific language where writing "livelistr = craigslist + socialcam" results in a new product called livelistr consisting of all permutation of the api's of craigslist and socialcam being depolyed to the web.

I came up with it by brainstorming start up ideas that consisted of compositions of other existing products, and recognizing that mvp's for these ideas could be hacked together by wiring up the api's of the constituents in some way.

It will make money by charging a fee to deploy the resulting products to the web.

It's awesome because it allows anyone with a startup idea to be an entrepreneur without needing to learn to code.

No similar products exist.

I will write the software that figures out what products the users are trying to compose, maps their api's, permutates them, and generates a product ready to be tested.</comment>


Why Outsource? Why to MustWin? - <AUTHOR> http://mustwin.com/2014/01/18/why-outsource-why-to-mustwin <comment><AUTHOR> Love Mike's post, he sent this out over our WINter trip to SLC this weekend!

Was just reminded of another great post on tc last year that gets into some of the benefits our clients (CoTap, Docurated, Microsoft, Off Base Productions, SquareTrade, etc) have enjoyed by outsourcing to a high end consultancy like oursleves: [http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/stop-looking-for-a- technica...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/15/stop-looking-for-a-technical-co- founder)</comment>


IE gains market share at the expense of Firefox, Chrome - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/08/firefox-and-chrome-lose-share-ie-gains.ars

<comment><USER2> It seems likely to me that this is the result of the massive success of Windows 7 - users are just upgrading from XP where they may have been using Firefox or Chrome after a friend/relative/coworker suggested they switch and are now using the default Win7 browser: IE8.

</comment><comment><USER3> <http://gs.statcounter.com/>

StatCounter tells very different story.. No decrease for Chrome, Firefox. Decrease for IE and Safari. Exactly the opposite of ars version.</comment>


Automated Pro-Trump Bots Overwhelmed Pro-Clinton Messages - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/technology/automated-pro-trump-bots-overwhelmed-pro-clinton-messages-researchers-say.html <comment> aaron-lebo Here is the paper:

[http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data- Mem...](http://politicalbots.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Data-Memo-US- Election.pdf)

I really dislike the basis of their research which is:

 _Twitter provides free access to a sample of the public tweets posted on the platform. The platform's precise sampling method is not known, but the company itself reports that the data available through the Streaming API is at most one percent of the overall global public communication on Twitter any given time. [6]_

So...we aren't going to mention a selection issue at all? Is that 1% of global Tweets a truly random sample? Can you confirm Twitter isn't manipulating the output? We have examples of them censoring stuff this cycle...

 _In order to get the most complete and relevant data set, the tweets were collected by following particular hashtags identified by the team as being actively used during the debate._

What's the methodology for selection? I'd hope research out of Oxford would be a little better argued. But of course since it's Oxford this research will get quoted in the New York Times by people who probably don't understand the paper they are reporting on and we'll have talking heads endlessly parroting why this justifies censorship.

All this research is showing evidence of is that the stream Twitter _provides_ is pro-Trump. It's a massive leap of faith to assume this data truly is representative and non-biased.

<comment><USER2> Ignoring whether it's pro-Trump or pro-Clinton, don't you find the idea of automated parroting of political speech via bots a bit obnoxious?

And maybe the platforms - Twitter, etc - have a responsibility to not publish those posts?

<comment><USER3> This has always been my concern about Twitter. If taken as an actual sample of the behavior of the population, anyone with a reasonable amount of money and time can portray the population as they choose. It's too easy to manufacture scandal, racial tension, phobias, inflammatory news and then treat a response as somehow reflective of the populace.

I've grown up and spent my entire life in the south. I've never had a parent, relative or friend even hint that I should view/treat any race differently than any other. You'd hear the occasional bad joke at school...but that was about it.

From the news cycle at this point, I feel like I'm supposed to have been mailed my own KKK gear as an expected housewarming gift.

<comment><USER4> What was the local reaction to e.g. Black Lives Matter, or did the subject never come up? There definitely are communities where politics is a taboo subject, but I think it's increasingly rare these days.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What about the fact that Twitter deleted trending hashtags that were negative to Clinton? And the takeover of reddit's /r/politics by the Correct the Record PAC? This story is far bigger than a few twitter bots. It's hard to know anymore who is genuine and who is a paid sock puppet in certain forums.

<comment><USER6> The idea of CTR-controlled subreddits seems to be some form of mass hysteria. You will never see anyone post any evidence of the alleged CTR conspiracy, other than "people upvote news I don't like".

<comment> aaron-lebo Well, we know they have lots of money:

[https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997](https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00578997)

And we know their mission:

 _Correct The Record will invest more than $1 million into Barrier Breakers 2016 activities, including the more than tripling of its digital operation to engage in online messaging both for Secretary Clinton and to push back against attackers on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram. Barrier Breakers 2016 is a project of Correct The Record and the brainchild of David Brock, and the task force will be overseen by President of Correct The Record Brad Woodhouse and Digital Director Benjamin Fischbein. The task force staff's backgrounds are as diverse as the community they will be engaging with and include former reporters, bloggers, public affairs specialists, designers, Ready for Hillary alumni, and Hillary super fans who have led groups similar to those with which the task force will organize._

[http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project- of-...](http://correctrecord.org/barrier-breakers-2016-a-project-of-correct- the-record/)

It it just a conspiracy?

<comment><USER7> 1) $1 million doesn't go far to be honest.

2) People on Reddit and elsewhere noted pro-Trump videos with thousands of shares and a couple hundred views repeatedly. The only way that would happen is with bots since to trigger the share link on YouTube would be by viewing the video.

<comment> aaron-lebo 1) They've spent almost $10 million as of today. That was 6 million in late October and 1 million in March. It's just ramping up.

2) Yeah. Trump and Russia are doing it, too. It's just as nefarious there. Why is the standard defense of Clinton whataboutism?

<comment><USER8> Frankly, I see whataboutism being used regardless of political persuasion. (Is this a whataboutist response to whataboutism?)

I think the only way to combat accusations of whataboutism is to rigorously apply the same standards whenever these things are brought up and do one's best to remove even the appearance of partisanship when making them. That can be tough to do.

You know, stuff like this is actually where people can cross party lines and work together. Find an issue that should be non-partisan, set aside the other issues they may disagree on, and get something positive done.

Edit to add: I didn't think this was controversial. If you down vote, I'd appreciate it if you would take the time to comment in the interest of communication.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > For example, the top 20 accounts, which were mostly bots and highly > automated accounts, averaged over 1,300 tweets a day

That works out to about 1 tweet/minute per day... how is this not spam? Why can't Twitter do the most basic of spam filtering? And you know why I don't use Twitter anymore? It's because of this. They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number of tweets/day.

<comment><USER10> > They optimized for the wrong metric: the number of accounts, or the number > of tweets/day.

Who optimized for this, Twitter or the SV VCs?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm worried about the sudden drumbeat of post-election "fake news" articles. It's really just a subtle form of censorship (and an attempt to control the social media narrative).

<comment><USER12> There stories still doing the rounds saying Hillary, Soros etc are all some stanic pedo cabal..

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Non-automated, boiler-room conversation disruptors from the Clinton campaign overwhelmed online forums throughout the election. They all disappeared the day after; most of them seemed to disappear at around 5:00 CST on election day. I still don't know how press-releasing that you were going to have people on discussion boards paid to disrupt negative messages, and who were not going to identify themselves, was a good move. It didn't seem like a legal requirement to go public; could it have been to drum up business for Brock himself to do the same service for other companies or politicians, or just a way to seem forward-looking and tech-savvy (and Obama-like?) It's strange that the left-identified candidate would openly use a tactic that was previously associated with China and Russia (employing boiler-room internet trolls at scale.) Especially for Clinton, who spent a lot of time during the campaign trying to promote new Cold War fears. In addition, it ended up compromising the advocacy of her honest supporters by putting them under the suspicion of being paid people.

It was pretty terrifying how many fake people were used from both major candidates this election. This bot/shill divide between the campaigns looks like another way in which Trump went frugal and still managed to be effective. I think that in the end, Brock's people ended up repulsing voters rather than helping their candidate.

</comment><comment><USER14> >"Anyone who claims that automated spam accounts that tweeted about the U.S. election had an effect on voters' opinions or influenced the national Twitter conversation clearly underestimates voters and fails to understand how Twitter works," said Nick Pacilio, a Twitter spokesman.

The general approach to propaganda is to analyze the target audience and look for vulnerabilities (messages that might work) and susceptibilities (the effectiveness of a given message.)

The research link from politicalbots.org looks like a first-order pass using hashtags as a proxy for actual content, which is usually harder to analyze in an automated fashion. Understandable, but prone to errors, such as using pro- candidate hashtags with anti-candidate content.

But getting to the heart of the matter, it's hard to say how effective computational propaganda was in this election without more detailed testing and analysis.

Generally, a political campaign aims to do three things -- 1) motivate their followers to vote; 2) convert undecideds; 3) demoralize opponents. I could see bots doing 1) and 3) pretty well, but 2) not so much.

Of course, a well-designed experiment could prove me wrong.

</comment><comment><USER15> The question is, should Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit work harder to identify those networks and publicise those attempts to game the social networks?

These companies have all the tools to figure out orchestrated efforts.

<comment><USER16> Well I would say that is up to Twitter, Facebook and Reddit shareholders to decide since it is their property.

You don't get to cancel property rights because you don't like the reporting there. You also don't get to cancel freedom of speech because you don't like what someone is saying.

<comment><USER2> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech. I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to filter out automated messaging.

<comment><USER16> > A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation > of freedom of speech

It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship.

> I believe that the point being argued is that they have a responsibility to > filter out automated messaging.

No, there is no responsibility whatsoever. Users are free to not use the service if they don't like it.

If you see this different then we have different views on what private property is.

<comment><USER8> _" a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship."_

Would you expand on this? I don't follow how a third party other than the state could force Facebook to censor?

<comment><USER16> I'm not going to answer such a question pretending you are a 3 year old that really doesn't know how media + government collude and operate to control society.

You are incapable of seeing how it poses a threat to freedom of speech when all major media combined call for censorship? There's no point for me to engage in a discussion with you.

<comment><USER8> I'm sorry, but I think I'm asking a different question.

I'm not asking about whether Facebook can engage in censorship. That was addressed by you here:

 _> A private company censoring the content on their platform is not a violation of freedom of speech

It's not, but a third party forcing FB to censor or me to shut up is censorship._

I'm asking how a third party (someone other than Facebook or the government) can _force_ Facebook to censor.

I think figuring out how to create a constructive online community is an important and complex issue. It's not as simple as letting everybody do whatever they want. And limiting what can be done includes limiting speech in some way. How you do that in a way that's not censorship is a legitimate question.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> if you've read wikileaks, you would know that the New York Times is a known colluder with the Clinton Campaign and therefore can't be trusted with any political coverage.

<comment><USER18> This election taught me an important lesson about our media. I stop subscribing to CNN, FoxNews, NYTimes, and Washington Post. I will not click on any of their links or tweet their links for that matter. I signed up for Intercept for my daily dose of news. So far the reporting is excellent!

<comment><USER2> That's roughly the equivalent of trading a diet of donuts for a diet of cocaine. One's not healthy, the other will make you crazy.

<comment><USER18> Isn't that what's happening on Twitter? More bubbles for future....[https://www.fastcompany.com/3065777/inside-gab-the-new- twitt...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3065777/inside-gab-the-new-twitter- alternative-championed-by-the-alt-right)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> " and identified automated posting by finding accounts that post at least 50 times a day."

But they could just have 25 bots post twice a day..

</comment><comment><USER19> Does a bot writing tweets mean anything if no one reads them?

</comment><comment><USER20> Producing false statements about people with intent is libel. The people who deploy such bots should be held accountable every bit as much as any journalist. Job title means nothing: a fake news purveyor and a journalist should be held to the same standard.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is the second NYT article I see here today that is calling for more censorship because of some unsubstantiated claims. These people must be completely out of their minds.

<comment><USER21> I am guessing a reaction to total loss of trust in media by general public. Now they have launched a mass propaganda against alternative news by calling them "fake news" . Nytimes just doesn't get it.

<comment><USER22> I don't know if you have never met anyone who thought Obama was born in Kenya, or that Hillary Clinton murdered one of her campaign staffers but there is definitely fake news out there.

<comment><USER23> I don't know if you have never read any trump anti-semitic photo story on washington post?

<comment><USER24> Sounds like you and GP are in agreement then.

<comment><USER23> Then why was I downvoted?

<comment><USER8> Likely because of your tone and the way you conveyed your point, rather than the point yourself. That attracts down votes as well. If your message was that this happens regardless of party, you can say just that. FWIW, I think the tone of your parent could be better as well, which may have contributed to the manner in which you posted.

Given no one has commented on why they down voted, this is just speculation on my part based on what I've seen elsewhere on HN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I find it surprising that degree-less, low-income, conservatives (classical trump supporters) are going to be techy enough to program Pro-Trump bots.

The tech hackers are not on the conservative scene, but on the liberal front. This is why Obama had such a great campaign in both terms, and the conservative I-want-it-too failed outright.

Edit: LOL! I get downvoted for being demeaning, but my points stands. No apologies.</comment>


Poor man's IFTTT in 3 lines of code - <AUTHOR> http://blog.lagentz.com/general/automate-your-shell-scripts-using-inotify-and-inotifywait/

<comment><USER2> Regarding the watermark generation process, although the bash script works, I immediately reach for my old friend (GNU) make(1) for that kind of task. Here's the Makefile:

        all: watermark

        done:=$(wildcard *-BD.pdf)
        src:=$(filter-out $(done),$(wildcard *.pdf))
        marked:=$(patsubst %.pdf,%-BD.pdf,$(src))

        watermark: $(marked)

        %-BD.pdf: %.pdf
        	./watermark_script.sh $< $@

The _done_ + _filter-out_ mumbo jumbo is there just because without it, -BD.pdf would be matched by .pdf, and therefore would generate -BD-BD.pdf... and so on (this is a loophole that the original bash script has, if parallel runs are timed correctly). Putting the output files in another directory is left ans an exercise for the reader.

The inotify script becomes:

        inotifywait -e create /home/user/pdfs && make -C /home/user/pdfs

There is another loophole here, in that the -BD.pdf are created in that directory, so the script gets run again. It doesn't matter for our makefile, which will do nothing on the second run, but there is the 'parallel runs if timed correctly' issue of the original bash script.

Generally, GNU make has a bunch of very interesting facilities, making it much, much more powerful than its ancestors (BTW, people interested may want to take a look at an implementation of non-recursive make[0], which — while being awesome — also shows up some useful make tricks).

Now, regarding the filesystem events and userland tools (which are awesome), I wish there was a unified front-end for this kind of things (inotify on Linux, fsevents on OSX...)

PS: I wish the comment form supported something like markdown, so that I could escape those wildcards, and more.

[0] [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/559216/what-is-your- exper...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/559216/what-is-your-experience- with-non-recursive-make)

<comment><USER3> I'm sorry if I missed this, but why would you use make instead of bash?

<comment><USER2>
        make figures out which files need updating
        make allows to write pattern rules (.c.o:, or %.o: %.c)
        you don't need to move files out of the 'inbox'
          to ignore them
        regenerating a file is a touch(1) away
        make is descriptive, not imperative (invaluable
          readability when you're coming back on it years later)
        should you ever need a second transformative step or
          a new dependency, it's trivial to insert, and make
          will figure stuff out
        make can trash intermediate results automatically
        make is crazy fast
        make variables are not environment variables
        make has multiple variable assignations, resulting in
          some early/late evaluation system (early with :=,
          late with =, $() is always late unless part of a :=)
        make outputs commands as they're executed (not with a global)
        make outputs nothing when commands are prefixed with @ (not with a global)
        make interrupts itself on a chain failure
        each make recipe line is executed in a distinct shell

You can set bash to do some of those things, or you can write bash code that do some of those, but most of the time you end up just coercing bash into behaving like make.

Of course I would not write everything in make. But knowing what make can do makes it the obvious choice for some tasks, and helps you coming up with a robust task/generator system in a snap, whereas coming up with a task/generator system in bash quickly is already not _that_ easy, and making it robust even less.

<comment><USER4> "make is crazy fast"

Make calls the shell in order to run programs, correct?

(IOW, does make call execve directly, as the shell does?)

<comment><USER2> Indeed, execve in exec_command (job.c). That does not make it slow, since it's the very last part of the game, and one you could not really do without.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I use this to compile my LESS scripts already. I was always getting really frustrated with the options with LESS... either compile in the browser, or compile manually. Both were actually a bit of a pain, (caching being the biggest annoyance for browser compilation).

So I used inotifywait...

It would check for any modifications to my "CSS" folders recursively, and it would then run my custom less compilation script [1] ...

         #!/bin/bash
         while inotifywait -e modify -r /var/www/site/public/static/css/base; do
           cd /var/www/site/public/static/css; node compile;
         done

(I also hooked this up to Fab [2], and used a "start"/"stop" script [3] to pause the watch, so that I could manually control when inotify wait would be watching.

[1] <https://gist.github.com/3497304> (My Custom LESS compile Script)

[2] <http://docs.fabfile.org/en/1.4.3/index.html> ( Fabric Command Line Tool )

[3] <https://gist.github.com/3497308> (Sample Fab Command )

If it would benefit anyone to know in greater details, I'd be happy to write a blog post about automating compilation using these tools.

<comment><USER6> I solved this problem using <http://leafo.net/lessphp/>. Obviously that only works if you are programming in PHP, but I would imagine there are similar solutions available for other languages?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found this a very intrusive site - I really dislike these animated slide in fade in distractions.

<comment><USER8> Not only the slide-in nonsense, but also the wiggling "Try Me!" arrow on the right. "You may also like" panels are becoming the Clippy of blogs and news sites.

<comment><USER9> Didn't see any of it with noscript on.

What's the "try me" pointing to? I tried clicking it and it did nothing, scrolling down it just points to blank right margin all the way ...?

I have no problem with "you may also like" and have found the links useful on occassion; anything animated without user interaction however is generally a turn off for me.

<comment><USER10> _What's the "try me" pointing to?_

Some kind of feedback tool about the site.

<comment><USER11> I used the feedback tool to inform the author that the "Try me!" was annoying enough to cause me to want to leave a nasty note.

So I guess it worked?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The inotify script likely has a race condition; if the directory is modified while an update is running, it won't pick up the second modification, and will wait in a dirty state until it is modified again. If anyone wants a race-free solution, you should check out my NCD scripting language [1] which has an integrated command to receive directory change notifications (last example in Blockers section is a race-free solution to this problem).

[1] <http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/wiki/NCD>

<comment><USER13> After a very brief look, NCD looks very cool. I'm curious about the first complete example. Is it possible to implement a delay of a few seconds before the IP address is reset when the link is lost?

<comment><USER12> I've never seen why that would be useful. Switches and Ethernet cards aren't that unreliable in my experience, and I've plugged cables into a different switch in less than a few seconds :) I think if you _really_ needed that, the nicest way would be to add it as a feature to net.backend.waitlink(). See source [1] of this command, and source of sleep() [2] to see how to use a timer. It may also be possible to hack it up without C-coding using blocker(), spawn(), sleep() and maybe other control commands.

[1] [http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/source/browse/trunk/ncd/modu...](http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/source/browse/trunk/ncd/modules/net_backend_waitlink.c) [2] [http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/source/browse/trunk/ncd/modu...](http://code.google.com/p/badvpn/source/browse/trunk/ncd/modules/sleep.c)

<comment><USER13> I've had a situation where an Ethernet connection would occasionally drop link for a very small fraction of a second, which unnecessarily shut down the interface and reset all TCP connections. Maybe a few second delay is too long, but 500ms seems reasonable. Also, maybe I wouldn't want to keep the old address blindly, but trigger a DCHP request if the link is dropped and restored before the timeout.

Also, thanks for the pointers into the source code. It looks like I would want to make the change around line 67 of net_backend_waitlink.c. I highly doubt I'll actually get around to doing it though :).

<comment><USER12> So you really need this, would that mean you may be able to use my language for something? If so, just say, and I can add this little feature, but I wouldn't like spending time for nothing :)

<comment><USER13> I haven't seen this problem recently, so don't worry about it. I appreciate the offer, though. Maybe some day I'll look into adding the feature for my embedded Linux systems, if I ever add Ethernet disconnection detection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In 2006, as inotify first hit the kernel, some friends and I wrote fsniper [1] to accomplish this same task. There's also incron [2] which is similar. In today's parlance we'd call fsniper "opinionated" about its workflow.

[1] <http://github.com/l3ib/fsniper> [2] <http://inotify.aiken.cz/>

</comment><comment><USER15> Someone please tell me what IFTTT is.

<comment><USER16> <http://ifttt.com/wtf>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Granted another linux specific method but I'd recommend incrond. Works very well for such tasks. [http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-inotify-examples-to- repli...](http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-inotify-examples-to-replicate- directories/)

</comment><comment><USER18> I wrote something similar the other day, but failed to realize that having a utility that locks until there are changes (vs one that calls a program when changes happen) is much easier to integrate with bash scripts.

</comment><comment><USER19> Great use-case for lnotify, haven't thought about that. Feels much cleaner than having cron jobs for conversions like these.

<comment><USER20> With the listen gem you can write crossplatform scripts (<http://rubygems.org/gems/listen>).

<comment><USER21> For those of Perl persuasion, there are:

        * File::ChangeNotify (https://www.metacpan.org/module/File::ChangeNotify)
        * Filesys::Notify::Simple (https://www.metacpan.org/module/Filesys::Notify::Simple)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've had some IFTTT-esque ideas with <http://noflojs.org/> as well

</comment><comment><USER23> Is usersnap.com really facilitating better feedback or is it just annoying people that visit your website?

<comment><AUTHOR> Used as a feedback tool you are way faster to understand what your visitors mean. Used as a bug reporting tool it's unbeatable: you get exactly what your testers / users see in their browser. Please note that the Try-Me arrow is not part of usersnap - that's maybe the annoying part you are referring to?</comment></comment>


Hotel melancholia - <AUTHOR> http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/hotel-rooms-and-the-despair-of-endless-travl/

<comment><USER2> Separation from close friends and family is correlated with hotel room stays (especially for work) . Lack of meaningful social interaction and melancholy go hand in hand.

You can have meaningful relationships in cyber-space but bandwidth is higher in meatspace. Hence the feeling of isolation.

</comment><comment><USER3> I hear people say this all the time, that hotel rooms are sad and empty. I don't get it. I used to travel a lot and I always found living in hotel rooms kind of nice. I wonder whether men and women process this differently. All of her examples in the article are women.

<comment><USER4> I'm a man and I find hotel rooms sad and empty. I, too, used to travel a lot. I spent a number of years living out of hotels in order to be at client sites, and I found them incredibly alienating. I can't be sure, though, whether this aversion to hotel rooms developed because I didn't like the rooms themselves, or because of my dislike of the travelling and client work. In either case, a decade later I still avoid travelling for pleasure at least partly because of my dislike of hotel rooms.

<comment><USER5> Have you tried renting renting residential homes (airbnb) when on vacation?

<comment><USER4> No, but the only vacations I've gone on since have been to visit people I know, so I just stay with them.

Even if I weren't visiting people, I don't think I'd want to stay in a real residential home through airbnb. I think I might lean towards a more business-y bed and breakfast place though, instead of a hotel.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Article is really about homesickness having a Pavlovian association with hotels.

<comment><USER7> I don't think so. I identified with some of it, and I'm rarely homesick. Confined and dissociated, though: in hotels, I feel like that regularly.

<comment><USER8> If I am travelling by myself and staying in "international business bland" style hotels I can definitely suffer from those feelings - I've certainly woken up and wondered which city/country/continent I am on!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> An interesting take on the experience of occupying a transient and impersonal space, but also a reflection of the author's perspective on travel. The two are not the same.

Being disconnected from friends and family, being too narrowly focused on work, or actively avoiding human entanglements as the author admits, is a perfect framing device for melancholy. Whether this takes place in a home or in a hotel is simply a matter of setting.

Having held a travel-intensive consulting position in an earlier part of my career, I absolutely identify to the melancholy of constant dislocation. However, now that I work primarily at home, I do miss the occasional changes of scenery and am looking forward to my upcoming vacation overseas.

The moral of the story is that balance matters, as does context. Too much constant motion produces alienation. Too little produces boredom. And it's much easier to look forward to a personal trip than a business trip, because the former is much more directly rewarding. As important as it is to travel, it's just as important to have a sense of homecoming when it's over.

</comment><comment><USER10> I've been traveling over the past year and mostly staying in Airbnb accommodations. They're such a far cry from any hotel. You get to live like a local. You get a friendly local contact. You get to experience so many different living conditions, from tiny rooftop apartments to sprawling 3-story family homes to cool stone rooms in buildings that must have been around since the 12th century. You get to see all the myriad ways different people decorate their homes. You can cook. You can work. You can leave whenever you want. Sometimes you even get to play with the owner's pets!

I've had to stay in hotels a few times over the course of my travels and it's just been a drag in comparison. No matter how tasteful they are, hotel rooms just feel like prison cells with their kischy decor, activity binders, and 1970's televisions. They're cold, clinical spaces that that exist in a sort of diorama dimension outside the jurisdiction and influence of the real world. And they're more expensive, too.

</comment><comment><USER11> I see hotel rooms as a sanctuary after visiting out-of-state family all day.

All. day.

</comment><comment><USER12> This song seems completely relevant: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oKn3Hz2u_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oKn3Hz2u_Q)

</comment><comment><USER13> this is why i love airbnb</comment>


Go's New Brand - <AUTHOR> https://blog.golang.org/go-brand <comment><USER3> This makes me incredibly (to me) sad. The identity is so completely soulless, and the logo is the opposite of timeless, trying to grasp currently oh so hip and pop retro aesthetic. Nevermind that the retro logo and super sleek modern visual identity seems to clash with each other, _both_ are abandoning the playfulness that was so prevalent before, most clearly evident in the various Go gopher illustrations.

And its not that the designs here are bad in isolation; overall the visual identity is very sleek, and I could imagine it working well for something else; RedHat and JetBrains are the first things that come to mind. But for Go, this logo is the one that I acknowledge:

[https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png](https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png)

Funny thing here is that I'm don't even like Go that much, and still I had such strong negative reaction to this branding.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree here. It's like they tried to make the new branding as generic as they possibly could.

I liked the simple, basic site that Go has always used. It seems inevitable that they'll redo the site, to include megabytes of JavaScript for features that nobody wants, like hijacked scrolling. (The site[0] for the design agency they talk about loads about 3 MB. Almost none of it is images. The site loads all that to display approximately ten words.)

Also,

>The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape and allowing the mark and the mascot to pair well together.

If by "pairing well together", you mean not going together in any way, then yes.

[0]: [http://within.us/](http://within.us/)

<comment><USER5> Jesus christ that site is bad.

It's like they tried to tick every box in the "obnoxious and annoying" category:

* It's inexplicably large

* It's slow af

* Scroll hijacking

* back button hijacking

* There's elements that appear when I scroll, but they disappear so you don't actually appear to be able to look them any more than in passing. (Notably the colourful logos for Google and Priceline).

* Did I mention it's slow? Scrolling is slow. Clicking on things is slow. Animations are slow.

* ~Half the code isn't even minified and a coworker pointed out that some of it doesn't appear to even be used.~ Nevermind, some of it does appear to be minified/resized.

* 3.8+ Megabytes of JS, really? Really really? Why?

<comment><USER6> I am so utterly infuriated at their incompetence. How could they not see these obvious points? I hope they're reading because they ruined the face of an otherwise, very cool programming language project in our times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Caveat: I'm a software developer who's worked in agencies for half of my 20 year career. A few thoughts:

1\. Branding is hard: everybody things they can do it. Creative direction and art direction are really, really hard. If you haven't seen the "Make my logo bigger cream" video, go watch it, and then have some grace with the Go team. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgcX0y1Nzhs)

2\. A brand is WAY more than a logo. I get that's the first thing you grab, but the logo is just the identify of the brand. If you think it's all creative mumbo jumbo, I encourage you to go read Aaker's "Building Strong Brands" [https://www.amazon.com/Building-Strong-Brands-David- Aaker/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Building-Strong-Brands-David- Aaker/dp/002900151X)

Go read the Brand Guide twice before you start throwing darts. [https://storage.googleapis.com/golang-assets/go-brand- book-v...](https://storage.googleapis.com/golang-assets/go-brand- book-v1.0.pdf)

Having seen 100s of these over the years, this is excellent work from people who honestly care. It also addresses almost every single negative comment on this thread.

I also like how they call out explicitely "The gopher is not a logo" which is entirely true. I think it's more of a "lovemark" (see [https://www.amazon.com/Lovemarks-Kevin- Roberts/dp/157687270X](https://www.amazon.com/Lovemarks-Kevin- Roberts/dp/157687270X))

It's not my favorite logo, but it's definitely on brand.

If the go team is reading this: it might help if you lead with the mark and the mascot together. I think the logo in isolation is what's generating the strong reaction.

<comment><USER8> Apologies, but I disagree with basically everything you're saying here.

Branding isn't hard; forcing a constructed brand is hard. That's the real source of friction here.

A brand might be way more than a logo, but THIS brand is not. That logo is literally the only thing this design agency contributed at all. Even the colors were already in use around the project. If the difference between "a brand" and "a logo" is "ten pages of marketspeak" then I'm even less convinced that branding is hard.

I read the "brand guide." It's exactly what I expect from a professional design firm: meaningless noise, carefully typeset. The entirety of section 1 is a PR quickref chart, of no interest or use to anyone but project managers dealing with micromanaging executives. Section 2.0 is breathless pseudo-art crap and some trademark defense. 2.1 contains pointless backstory for fonts that are firmly in the "Google already had lying around" category. Finally, the cartoon gets its own section, expressly to head off the whining from the old guard.

I've also seen a ton of this crap over the years, and none of it has ever made the slightest bit of difference. This is exactly the kind of time-and-money- wasting that occurs when some facet of management has gone off the rails. Let's hope the derelict in question is somewhere in marketing, and unable to affect the quality of the actual technology in question.

As for the actual logo, I don't have an opinion about it. I don't think there's anything there to have an opinion about. I've never been a big fan of the gopher cartoon, but at least it had some character, which likely comes from the talent of a real artist.

<comment><USER7> > Branding isn't hard; forcing a constructed brand is hard. That's the real > source of friction here.

Let's agree to disagree. I've been involved in dozens of branding processes. None of them were easy, from the strategy to the creative to the execution.

If the agency did their job, the brand guide _should_ feel obvious. That's how you know it's on brand.

<rant>I find this sort of comment very condescending to designers. I'n not a designer, but I've managed them. Good design is hard. Good creative is hard. Good branding is hard. This was excellent work, and if you see "marketspeak" you need to re-evaluate what good creative work looks like.</rant>

<comment><USER9> Marketspeak is marketspeak because it lacks honesty and authenticity.

It's like "artist's statements" that are written so impenetrably that it's impossible for anyone to understand what the artist actually meant to do with the artwork. And that's deliberate, because of where the art world has got now.

If the designers of this shitshow were honest in their statement then it'd be "we made it look like this because it was the easiest and simplest method of getting it past the mass of middle-managers who got to veto the creative without contributing any positive ideas themselves. The brief was to be as inoffensive and non-controversial as possible".

As another commenter said, Go is brutalist. The gopher never quite suited it. But at least it was fun and original and different. But this... this is shite.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Eh, I'm really not feeling this. I mean, I just really loved that silly little cartoon gopher and his goofy little eyes. It had a personality.

This is something that really irritates me about Google and their products, services, "stuff" if you will. Their branding is contemporary but at the same time has absolutely no excitement or personality to it. I mean, it's till contemporary, it still uses interesting colors and stuff, but they strip away all personality from everything that they do in the interest of appealing to a worldwide audience.

Whatever, joke's on them, I'm going to vehemently deny that this new brand exists. I'm not going to let a branding agency ruin things for me.

<comment><USER11> To be fair, the gopher does appear on their branding in place, just not where the blog post has shown.

The agency page for their work on Go features an updated gopher graphic, and I think the home page looks quite nice. The branding booklet looks like standard agency stuff, but if they were to use the gopher a bit more I could get behind it.

[http://within.us/google-go/](http://within.us/google-go/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> _The circular shape of the letters hints at the eyes of the Go gopher, creating a familiar shape_

I found it agreeable, woody, complex and balanced, with notes of ash and clover.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Is that a bit of peach on the finish? And maybe some citrus?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can't resist a good design critique so here goes. My take echoes many of the gut first impressions expressed by others.

Presumably the Go design team added the speed lines at the left to connote speed, performance, and and the future progress and adoption of the language. But the way the lines are conceived is generic. The variation of lengths, meant to evoke the chaotic air turbulence behind a rapidly accelerating race car, is tired. Nothing we haven't seen millions of times before. And not particularly well thought out. In direct contradiction to the expressive power and beauty of the language itself.

The best thing about the design is of course the hidden encapsulation of the mathematical symbol for "infinity". Although, again I find myself at a loss to understand the exact nature of the relation. A possible reference to the ability to spawn millions of goroutines?

The execution of the infinity symbol itself is muddled by the sharp corners of the G's aperture. Shouldn't it be more rounded? It's menacing resemblance to a PC-era on/off power symbol rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise is distracting.

And lastly, the most troubling of all. Whither the beloved Gopher? A clear nod to the linux penguin. And a secret totem to those who have been initiated. A hieroglyph for the high priests. No text necessary.

Make no doubt about what this rebranding portends. Enterprise Go, Team Edition coming soon ;)

<comment><USER14> > A clear nod to the linux penguin. And a secret totem to those who have been > initiated. A hieroglyph for the high priests. No text necessary.

That's... looking into it quite a lot, isn't it? It seems like just a playful mascot.

<comment><USER15> Yeah, if anything it's a nod to Plan 9's Glenda the bunny -- they're by the same artist, even!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Looks like a courier company. Very bland and corporate looking which I guess is the focus of Go as a language. It am a mediocre programmer so I really like Go, it is my main language, but it is an uninspiring language by design.

This logo looks aimed at suits and not the Go community. That might not be a bad thing for Go jobs and for Google. Open source communities often have puns in naming or plushy worthy logos and just generally playfulness which I don't see in this logo.

<comment><USER17> Reminds me of the playful acronym for PHP, which is "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor".

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The rebranding might make the language look sleeker and more enterprisey but it looks that they're rejecting their spirit of playfulness in order to appeal to the likes of Oracle clients and take away more Java mindshare.

<comment><USER19> TBH I've always thought of Go as Google's Java. With some decisions to make developing at super-big-co even nicer, which helps you at google scale.

<comment><USER20> I always thought of Go as Google's Erlang.

<comment><USER21> I think this gets too many downvotes. Yes, static vs dynamic typing. Yes, imperative vs functional language. On the other hand, CSP is conceptually fairly close to the Actor Model, so there are definitely similarities. I've written go code that looks similar to Erlang (a go routine receiving messages from an `interface{}` channel in a for loop and then dispatching based on the type.

<comment><USER22> Conceptually they are worlds apart. Supervision trees are even impossible in idiomatic Go.

<comment><USER21> Supervision trees have nothing to do with Actors or CSP. I can recommend reading the original papers.

Golang not well supporting supervision trees has more to do with the runtime not allowing to kill a goroutine. See [http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930](http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2930)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Highly disappointing. They took the soul out of it, the gopher is not even included as part of the logo, like a wink in history. The Gopher IS GO! Its scruffy looks, small and mighty made it approachable and fun.

This looks like they hired an external team of wan#&$%, pardon the term, but humour me for a second: the brand guide pdf:

\- ven diagram, check

\- big wanky words, check

\- big wanky opposite words, check

\- proxy terms that are samey to any brand they'd do, check

This could have been delivered on April 1st.

<comment><USER24> I checked the date to make sure this wasn't an old April Fools' joke. The new design language is minimalistic, but it's not simple, and doesn't reflect the programming language at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks awfully like design by committee, lowest common denominator taste. There is zero distinctiveness and character.

Even java kept coffee cup and duke.

<comment><USER22> Doesn't look like design by committee to me, just shows lack of experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Sleek new logo makes it look like a bicycle renting start up. While I think its good to refresh branding and aim to unify more things, I will miss the Go Gopher.

<comment><USER27> Renee French, the original illustrator of the Go Gopher, is still updating the gopher: [http://reneefrench.blogspot.com](http://reneefrench.blogspot.com)

I'm partial to this take on the little fella: [http://reneefrench.blogspot.com/2016/11/blog- post.html](http://reneefrench.blogspot.com/2016/11/blog-post.html)

<comment><USER28> Creepy (the fuzzy gopher-dalek, not you)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Perhaps this won't be a popular sentiment, but since when did programming languages need brand identity?

<comment> cup-of-tea One of the reasons I really like Python is it never had any of this crap. It's popular just because it's useful and people like it.

<comment><USER30> I think that though Python is popular independent of its branding, it definitely has a strong branding system, just less explicitly stated as go's. Their font is quite iconic, and their logo and colors more so: [https://www.python.org/community/logos/](https://www.python.org/community/logos/)

<comment><USER31> That all happened waaaay later.

<comment><USER32> Plus when it comes to moustaches, Python's is ... well ... "better than Cobol" seems an apt description.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> _" Rest easy, our beloved Gopher Mascot remains at the center of our brand"_

Then why is the mascot not featured in the post even once?

</comment><comment><USER34> Looks like they are loosing the bespoke Go fonts ([https://blog.golang.org/go- fonts](https://blog.golang.org/go-fonts)) and going with Work Sans and Roboto. I understand the reasoning.

Personally, I have a big soft spot in my heart for the go fonts . Whenever I feel like coding like it's 1979 again, I load them up in my editor and pretend I'm looking at well written documentation from my childhood.

[edit: Yay, Go fonts remain for source code display!]

<comment><USER35> Just checking, but did you see page 19?

<comment><USER34> Heh. I stopped at page 18 of the new styleguide at the body font section . So the Go font remains the official font for the display of source code. Yay!!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I know it is petty and irrational but I judge the quality of a software project by how boring it looks, where boringness is better. The more it looks like some university professor's web 0.1 hand-coded HTML project circa 1993 the better. Just look at this sexy boring website, it tells you that things are going to work perfectly with no bullshit or corporate-speak included. [https://gcc.gnu.org/](https://gcc.gnu.org/)

<comment><USER37> Compare to clang's website, which has the same aesthetic and is half as busy (visually): [https://clang.llvm.org/](https://clang.llvm.org/)

<comment><USER38> The logo for LLVM is a big silver dragon

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> They kept the gopher. But they provide a model sheet.

"The gopher is not a logo. However, when appropriate, it can and should be used on communications that are Go branded, but should not be used in place of our logo, nor should it be placed too closely around the logo, so as to infer it's an alternate logo."

Hey, they linked to a talk by Renee French about her design of the gopher: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rw_B4yY69k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rw_B4yY69k)

<comment><USER40> > "… nor should [the gopher] be placed too closely around the logo, so as to > infer it's an alternate logo."

I doubt the gopher is either clever enough or interested enough to infer that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> It's really sad and insulting to the language itself to do this - <USER2> there's nothing wrong with the design assets and guidelines, this looks like it was a template bought for $29.99 off a design website.

The problem is that the design has no connection or correlation at all with what the design is for. The difference is superbly obvious in the slide masters - look at the code samples - that code looks like it has absolutely no place on a slide like that.

That's true of the entire design language - it's great for a startup trying to be cool, but has nothing to do with Go. It's like what we'd get if we asked one of our designer interns to come with a brand language and the only brief they were given is "It's called Go, and this mascot is non-negotiable".

</comment><comment><USER42> I know folks love the gopher, but I'm a fan of this to be honest.

The hand drawn gopher just looked... childish? It definitely didn't give me the impression of an efficient and well put together programming language.

<comment><USER43> The Go gopher is a redraw of Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny. Many of Plan 9's principals worked on Go, which is itself an update of Alef, Plan 9's planned systems language, before it was canned and replaced with C.

I'm sure he'll still be around as a mascot. He's still on the site's main page. I really don't see the problem with him -- most commercial internet servers run a kernel with a cute penguin mascot, and many of the rest run a kernel with a cute mascot who is _literally the Devil_ \-- but I can appreciate the strategy of opening with a punchy, barebones logotype.

<comment><USER44> Was it really a redraw of the Plan 9 bunny? According to the Go website it says the gopher was created for a radio station fund raiser.

 _About 15 years ago—long before the Go project—the gopher first appeared as a promotion for the WFMU radio station in New Jersey. Renee French was commissioned to design a T-shirt for an annual fundraiser and out came the gopher._

<comment><USER43> Guess who also designed Glenda.

<comment><USER44> French, of course. The Gopher, however, is not a "redraw" of the rabbit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Logo design and acceptance (by the ones commissioning it) is a strange thing, in my experience. This new logo looks like a gas/fuel station logo or a racing logo. I can't imagine it being dissociated with these categories. The older gopher one, though kinda whimsical, was nicer, cuter and amenable to be modified to indicate different things in different contexts. This new logo is static and is the opposite of the old one in many ways.

New logo designs, of things that have been around for sometime, invite derision and ridicule (and for good measure). Getting used to such decisions will take time.

<comment><USER46> Ha! Gas station was the first thing that came to my mind, then car rental company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The "Go logo" has always been something like "-=GO"[1]. There's not much changing here, unless the announcement signals that they're going to start de- emphasizing the acquired-taste gopher.

[1] See the black/white image halfway down the page-- [https://blog.golang.org/gopher](https://blog.golang.org/gopher)

<comment><USER48> Spot on. It seems to me that everybody missed the point. The gopher won't go away (it appears in the official guide) but this new brand is just a modern evolution of the official logo which was eclipsed by the gopher.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Gopher got demoted to page 22? What a sad day to be a gopher.

</comment><comment><USER50> I may be in the rare (for this site) situation of never having heard of of GO (I'm not a programmer) when I clicked the link and my first impression was that this was rebranding for some food delivery service.

<comment><USER51> I thought "courier" immediately. I think it's clean and effective, but I don't have any interest/care for the language and don't recall ever having seen its gopher or whatever represented it before. I can appreciate that those who have would have a stronger and different reaction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I immediately thought of the book Go, Dog Go! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go,_Dog._Go](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go,_Dog._Go)!

The old gopher wasn't serious either, but at least it was fun.

</comment><comment><USER53> Why...the...fuck.... does a programming language need a branding team?????

<comment><USER54> To sell you shit, and sell you the appeal of using the language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> why fix whats not broken? I like the plan 9/unix/KISS style? Like who seriously sat there and was like, this is something we need help with and was like we need outside help with this.

The brand book is astonishingly horrible and is not an improvement on the way we are digesting the information.

</comment><comment><USER56> 1\. Go already has a brand and logo recognized by everyone. 2\. Go is a programming language, not a brand, I as a developer don't really care what the brand look like. So, to the community and the GO team: please don't make this a big deal!

</comment><comment><USER57> "Our logo follows the brand's core philosophy of simplicity over complexity."

The logo and the philosophy behind it are the first things anyone, professional designer or not, would think of. If Go's philosophy was to implement the first thing that comes to mind, it would have generics by now :) I think they need to put a little more thought into this.

Edit: Maybe the design could could incorporate a visual representation of goroutines in some way?

</comment><comment><USER58> A few more details on the design agency's site:

[http://within.us/google-go/](http://within.us/google-go/)

<comment><USER59> The phone mockup is weird. Can you even install Go on a phone?

<comment><USER44> You can certainly create Go based mobile applications on iOS and Android.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Well this certainly looks very corporate and professional now. I suppose that fits their targeted audience better.

<comment><USER58> It also makes developers vouching for Go seem more credible.

<comment><USER61> Do we really have to suck the fun out of everything in order to look 'credible'?

<comment><USER60> Fun was probably getting in Go's way in becoming the next Java.

<comment><USER61> IMO Go is in Go's way if becoming the next Java.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Yikes. What's next, using syntax highlighting on presentations?

</comment><comment><USER63> Imagine how many external contributors could have been sponsored to work on Go for the money Google blew on this project.

<comment><USER64> How much does it cost to "refine" the Speed Racer logo?

<comment><USER63> Way more than you think. And now that I told you that, 10-50x more than you revised estimation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is really the wrong move. Really sucks the personality out of go. I felt the old brand clearly highlighted the important thing is, and where the most time is spent, is the code

</comment><comment><USER66> This is interesting to me. I have more than a peripheral interest in art and design, but my day job is heavy systems programming using Go/Scala and the like. I think there is a huge market advantage to correctly branding stuff developers use. For me this is, excuse the hyperbole, almost objectively a terrible rebranding of Go. The Gopher, while not currently wholely representative of what Go has become...is iconic and a lovely homage to the playfulness and irreverency of hacker culture. What an opportunity to update and infuse the brand with how the language has developed. I love what other people are doing with the gopher (like the the dep packager).

On top of this, I can't get over the fact that the design team can't draw. What? How much are you guys getting paid?

</comment><comment><USER67> Looks like the logo for a stop-n-shop-style grocery store.

</comment><comment><USER68> It's ugly. Looks like a brand of sport shoes for 12 year olds.

I think the brand for a programming language like Go should not look like a toy.

<comment><USER69> That was exactly my first thought. Just add 2 more letters and you have "GOAL", a new brand of soccer equipment for children.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Wow. This is bad. It looks like a tire or automotive company logo for some reason. It seems like someone with no real design intuition was in charge of picking the final logo.

Why not make several ones and ask the community for their favorite one?

</comment><comment><USER71> There's only one purpose of good brand identity and that's to be remembered. I don't see how this is more memorable than the beloved Gopher.

Edit: Gopher is still the official mascot, though. So that's good.

</comment><comment><USER72> Looks like they had the interns design this during their down time. Really forgettable, and uninspired.

</comment><comment><USER73> The Gopher took a nice cozy corporate job and is sitting now in a cubicle. He wears a suit and a tie instead of Hawaiian shirt. It's a serious business now.

</comment><comment><USER74> This won't make the language any better.

It will make the language more approachable for new comers.

The Go website is _almost_ as bare bones as it gets. It functions fine and we are familiar with it.

But compared to say Python, the site looks pretty amateur. If you were to judge a language by its website, I'd say Python looks better.

The new branding can lead the way to a more put together presentation, and that could be good for the growth of the community.

<comment><USER44> The logo is just the start. The website will also be refreshed.

 _The website will be getting a refresh based on the new design. Since we are making significant changes, we are also taking this opportunity to update our website infrastructure to support internationalization and multilingual to better serve our global community. The migration will happen in stages over the next few months starting with this blog._

<comment><USER75> Go's online documentation is the best I've ever seen for a language. You can still hear Rob Pike's diction in the core functionality sections -- precise as a scalpel.

Now a "design agency" has their claws into it. My own feelings are nausea, and fear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Whatever. Everyone hates new designs at first and then we get used to them. Go is cool and I think it could be a good thing that they're putting some work into making it look cool. It's good to have an awareness of your programming language among non-technical people and use branding to communicate qualities they can't pick up by actually using the language.

<comment><USER3> > they're putting some work into making it look cool

They might be _trying_ to make it look cool, but what they have accomplished is to make it look corporate, which is pretty much diametrically opposite of cool.

<comment><USER77> If you're going to pick a language based on what's "cool", you might not be golang's target user base anyway...

<comment><USER3> GP comments choice of words, not mine

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I am not a branding expert, and that's a good thing, because it took a full 5 minutes to really figure out what the heck they are doing here. They wanted something "Simple & Speed" to be associated with Go which are certainly attributes of Go I have read about.

</comment><comment><USER79> While I don't really 'care' about the logo of a programming language per se, this makes 'GO' look like a courier / delivery company to me, it also seems a little odd that both letters are the same case.

</comment><comment><USER80> For some reason it instantly made me think of the cover of "Go,dog. Go!".

</comment><comment><USER81> It looks really bland and unremarkable now. Maybe just a little bit understated.

</comment><comment><USER82> I am going to miss the gopher :(

Go's branding will always be the gopher in my eyes.

</comment><comment><USER83> One thing about this new branding is that I have _never_ ever seen Go spelled with all caps (GO). Most only see it as either "Go" or "go". Spelling it with all caps ("GO") makes it look like a single shapeless typographic slab. "Go" is found in text, and "go" is found in code, cmd and everything related.

In the original the letters were thinner, and that could have made it feel more lightweight, so it wasn't that bad.

</comment><comment><USER84> This is so much better than that silly cartoon they had before. Sure it was cute and fun, but for a modern language it felt so ... childish. As someone who works professionally as an illustrator and dabbles with code, this is just my two cents, and whether you like or dislike a logo is 100% entirely subjective. This new logo/identity feels much more refreshing and importantly, professional. At least in my books.

Next up, Java's atrocious coffee cup logo perhaps?

</comment><comment><USER85> Does not compute. Go is speed now and Rust is just, well rust ?

<comment><USER86> It's faster write programs in Go. But programs in Rust run faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> The gopher was never the logo. From the brand book: > "The gopher is not a logo"

The gopher stays on as go's mascot. The brand book even has a page on how to draw it!

</comment><comment><USER88> Bland and forgettable.

The gopher mascot was embraced by the community. It's a programming language... the need for a "corporate brand treatment" should be mocked.

</comment><comment><USER89> At first glance I disliked it, but after a second look at it I think it's quite nice. It's bold, clean, and simple. People are generally resistant to change but it's something they'll become accustomed to fairly quick. Glad to know they kept the little guy gopher mascot.

</comment><comment><USER90> I like the old brand better... [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Golang.p...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Golang.png)

</comment><comment><USER91> Reminds me of a logo that was on a tv remote controller I used to have. Do they seriously think it's witty to most people? All I see is a two letter word without any context or deeper implications. Okay, maybe the word is moving right. But that's it.

</comment><comment><USER92> Reminds me of the logo for GQ India.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/GQ_India_logo...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/74/GQ_India_logo.png)

</comment><comment><USER93> \- Who is responsible for such rebrandings? Does the Google marketing team decide one day that the Go language needs a new identity, or was this a request by the language designers?

\- Does a rebranding need approval from the language designers?

</comment><comment><USER94> I don't like the big thin typeface in those materials, too snobby. The logo itself is OK, they should have used a bold font like that, and maybe just use the outlines to represent the lightweightness visually.

</comment><comment><USER95> It looks like the Gopher mascot will still be on the (possible) new frontpage [http://within.us/google-go/](http://within.us/google-go/).

</comment><comment><USER85> Is Go a programing language that lands you a job the fastest these days ?

</comment><comment><USER96> Judging from the palette, it looks to me that they're getting the language prepared for Android or more possibly Fuchsia.

I'm eager to see how they're going to replace Java little-by-little.

</comment><comment><USER35> I was very happy to see the Go font was a part of this (page 19).

</comment><comment><USER97> I'm so glad I don't have to sit through design presentations anymore. Just reading the first few words of the "Brand Book" made me die inside.

</comment><comment><USER98> This new logo looks sterile and boring, creativity-wise. It isn't clever neither. I'm excited for the official website redesign, however. It needs it.

</comment><comment><USER99> Man, even I prefer that cute little gopher to this new branding.

Better spend money improving the real issues of the language, instead of paying to agencies for this outcome.

</comment><comment><USER100> Gopher is a fork of Go, but keeps the cute Gopher logo FOREVER. ;)

LONG LIVE GOPHER!

Our homepage: [http://gopher.gg](http://gopher.gg)

<comment><USER101> that's cool! apply for gopher maintainer

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> The "new" logo looks even worse than TNT or UPS... Should we start a petition on Change.org to stop this happening??

</comment><comment><USER103> It looks like a ride-sharing service logo.

</comment><comment><USER46> I guess ya'll should just switch to erlang then with it's negative space internet explorer logo.

</comment><comment><USER104> Since it looks like an infinity symbol, so the little speed burst at the left is not working for me.

</comment><comment><USER105> The gopher was what initally caught my attention. Cant believe they did away of that little dude.

</comment><comment><USER101> [http://gopher.gg/](http://gopher.gg/)

</comment><comment><USER106> this is so stupid ... a freaking brand book for a programming language. god damn :-) can we get more hipster?

on the other hand, its also fun. maybe i should just complain less and enjoy the beautiful colors :D

</comment><comment><USER107> Go™ Enterprise Edition.

</comment><comment><USER108> the logo is pretty forgettable, but on the bright side - at page 24 of the PDF they announced that Go 2.0 will have generics

</comment><comment><USER109> I love how the favicon's still a gopher.

<comment><USER110> Not for long I think, they probably will redesign their entire site too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> Perhaps this new brand was just a psychological experiment to see how easy it is to bait Hacker News into a 200+ comment thread on bikeshedding?

<comment><USER112> I see you're being downvoted but this whole topic indeed is just that, bikeshedding.

</comment></comment><comment><USER113> Noooooooooooooooooo!!!!

gophers 4eva, I refuse the new logo.

</comment><comment><USER114> #NotMyLogo

</comment><comment><USER115> So you're a racing company?

</comment><comment><USER116> Reading the comments here makes it clear why most programmers should stay away from design.

I've programmed for 20 years now, but that stupid gopher and the way it was everywhere was a serious put off for me on giving Go a look. Nerdy AF.

Good riddance.

I wonder if there was a huge internal battle between the brand savvy people which realized how terrible the gopher was, and the Go creators.

Guys, don't be so stereotypical, expand your horizon outside of Pokemon and Star Wars esthetics. I'll put it in a more obvious form: a lot of you like Apple, can you imagine for a second that gopher on anything Apple?

Downvotes away...

<comment><USER3> You realize that the gopher (and glenda before it) was created by professional illustrator and not programmers?

<comment><USER117> That is true, but its also worth pointing out a bit of context: the gopher was created by Rob Pike's, one of the creators', wife, who happens to be a professional illustrator.

Point being, its not like it was contracted to a professional design team. They took a very efficient programmer-like path: have a relative who knows design make it. And I love that as a geek, and I love the gopher, but from the perspective of a design professional its time the language got a true logo in addition to a geeky mascot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER118> [https://i.ytimg.com/vi/335Qnh- GRcA/maxresdefault.jpg](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/335Qnh-GRcA/maxresdefault.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER119> Ironically, it looks very generic.

<comment><USER120> DOH. I totally came here to make this very joke. You win, good gentleperson. You win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER121> The logo reminds me of the old ATT 4G LTE logo [https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lcdgiiTwcYs/UYvQNF3qnzI/AAAAAAAAm...](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lcdgiiTwcYs/UYvQNF3qnzI/AAAAAAAAm-8/RRX7n_0S9KA/s1600/att- flame.png)

</comment><comment><USER122> Once the marketing types take over its the beginning of the end.

</comment><comment><USER44> The new logo actually has its roots in the original logo designed by Renee French.

[https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png](https://blog.golang.org/gopher/logo.png)

Rene French also suggested they use the Gopher, he originally designed for a radio station promotion, as the mascot for the language.

</comment><comment><USER123> Go developers are busy making fancy (or rather, pretty generic and bland) logos and thinking about "brand identities", while developers who use other languages do actual work. Does a programming language really need a logo, a cartoony mascot, an entire "brand guide" pamphlet and a "visual identity"? RMS was right when he said that software industry is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. We see this when developers pick their tools not according to their functionality, but to what is trendy and looks cool at the moment.

<comment><USER124> I'm pretty sure that Google hires separate people to work on branding and programming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> Honest opinion: Yuck.

Constructive feedback: I prefer the Gopher.

</comment><comment><USER126> at start I actually had doubts on go due to the mascot and the naming, like Go -> Google, they name it after the company, another thing they expect to put google in front of it and we have to love it.

</comment><comment><USER127> why kill the gopher?</comment>


Popular Ad Blockers AdBlock and UBlocker Deemed 'Fake' - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/adblock-ublock-fake-google-chrome-browser-extensions,40422.html <comment><AUTHOR> The web site is crap and loaded with ads, but the article itself raises some interesting questions. I wonder if any more reputable sources have verified/disproved this?</comment>


Attacking Hardware AES with Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) - <AUTHOR> https://yifan.lu/2019/02/22/attacking-hardware-aes-with-dfa/ <comment><AUTHOR> "The total cost of the whole experiment from the equipment to the boards to AWS EC2 was easily less than $1000. The majority of that cost was in the Rigol osciloscope (for debugging) ($400) and the ChipWhisperer Lite ($300).

In a world where software attacks are getting harder and harder to pull off and companies are protecting more and more of their software with hardware security, it seems like a huge oversight that the hardware is not protected as well."</comment>


A smart watch from scratch (open sourced, schematics) - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gallery/FSBwD3g <comment><USER2> Thanks for sharing this. Impressed by the details shared, nice mix of pics, data, and small vid clips. Wish some pricing info was there. I'd love to know what something like this cost to make and what parts could be much cheaper if scaled up just a little bit, like a short run of 100 units.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The code is at: [https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC](https://github.com/S-March/smarchWatch_PUBLIC)</comment>